American fiscal crisis is a minefield for Republicans

Has his re-election given U.S. President Obama more leverage with Congress?

Photograph by: Jerome Delay/AP Photo
, Postmedia News

WASHINGTON – While the majority of Americans can rejoice that Barack Obama is back for a second term as president, they still have to deal with the fact that change can be an illusion and the current government represents no more than the status quo that has deadlocked congress for years.

The critical monetary issues that were shelved while the politicians fought for their jobs, are now even more pressing. At the top of the list is the so-called fiscal cliff.

The “fiscal cliff” refers to a Jan. 1, 2013, deadline when the Budget Control Act of 2011 will go into effect resulting in record, across-the-board tax increases as well as roughly $530 billion in annual spending cuts of which half will target the military.

The Congressional Budget Office estimates the combination of both the tax increases and budget cuts will reduce the U.S. GDP by a whopping 4 percentage points next year and send the country back into recession. So the stakes are high not only for the struggling American economy but for the rest of the planet as well. All eyes, therefore, are on this battle.

The question is, has his re-election given Obama more leverage with Congress? With the election behind them, will congressional members be ready to compromise? And finally, will the fact that the Republicans face their own political cliff impact on their desire to moderate their policies?

Peter Hanson, a political scientist at Denver University, thinks Obama has the upper hand.

“President Obama has gained considerable leverage as a result of a pretty commanding victory in the swing states and this will help him to secure a deal with congressional republicans,” he said.

He added that because the Democrats have expanded their majority in the Senate, the Republicans might think they can negotiate a better deal now than after the new congress is seated in January.

But Tim Hagle, a political scientist at the University of Iowa who specializes in Republican politics, disagrees.

He said that since the House of Representatives has remained pretty well the same, members could argue that Americans approved of their deadlock tactics.

“Obama is going to try to claim a mandate because he got elected in a tough year (for the economy),” Hadley said. “But Republicans can say the same thing that basically people elected the congress because they approved what they were doing. So they are probably going to want to stand for their principles too.”

Still, Obama has some serious cards to play, the most important of which is the fiscal cliff itself. If Republicans stand silent as taxes increase and military spending decreases, many members could lose their seats in the 2014 congressional elections.

House districts tend to be small and homogenous. As long as representatives stick to the script written by their constituents, they will keep that seat for a long time. But any member who strays from the path is likely to be tossed out in the district primaries of the next election.

“It is House Republicans in safe districts who stand to gain the least by reaching any kind of accommodation with the president,” Hanson said. “In fact their electoral instincts point in the other direction. Their real worry is that they will face a primary challenge if they appear to be too moderate.”

This is what happened to Senator Richard Lugar in Indiana’s primaries. Republicans thought the longtime lawmaker had become too moderate and replaced him with Richard Mourdock, a right-winger who opposed abortion on demand. He lost Tuesday to Democrat Joe Donnelly.

Obama holds one other card. If Republicans learn anything from this election it is that they can no longer ignore the power of the women’s and minority vote. America is heading towards a point where the majority of its citizens will come from minority groups. African Americans, Asians and Hispanic communities will dominate as a bloc Democrat force. The Democrats took the swing states because they mobilized these communities around their policies.

The Republican base has stagnated around aging white men in rural America. It is a slow-leaking ship that could sink the party unless they moderate their policies and reach out to these voters, Hanson said.

A compromise on the fiscal cliff could signal that the party is ready to return to its more moderate roots when senators like Warren Hatch and Ted Kennedy sat down together to write legislation.

But Republican Senate minority leader, Mitch McConnell gave little hope of that. In a congratulatory note to Obama he blamed the president for the deadlock: “It’s time for the president to propose solutions that actually have a chance of passing the Republican-controlled House of Representatives and a closely-divided Senate, step up to the plate on the challenges of the moment, and deliver in a way that he did not in his first four years in office.”

Time is short and the president has been “very good at laying the blame at the foot of the Republicans and it may cause the Republicans to have to find some compromise but do it in a way that they can explain it to their constituents,” Hagle said. “But if they flat-out cave in that does not bode well for them.”

In other words, they would lose their seats in 2014 and likely also lose control of the House. So while Obama endured his pitched battles with a Republican House long enough to win a second term, little has changed. The highly partisan Republican constituents back home in places like Indiana, Georgia and Tennessee, who found Mitt Romney too moderate, still rule.

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